Today it is my pleasure to Welcome author Kate Robb to HJ!
Hi Kate and welcome to HJ! We’re so excited to chat with you about your new release, Solar Eclipse of the Heart!
Please summarize the book for the readers here:
Solar Eclipse of the Heart is about Annalise Harris, a twenty-six year-old neuroscientist who believes there is a scientific explanation for pretty much everything. Love is just a rush of dopamine and coincidence is our brain looking for patterns.
Until she goes into a thrift store, tries on an old leather jacket, and suddenly gets hit with a memory that doesn’t belong to her. Naturally, she assumes she’s having some kind of medical issue.
Enter Mackenzie: Annalise’s hot new guitar playing roommate and the new owner of the jacket.
Every time Annalise puts on the jacket she gets a flash of a new memory. As those memories begin to come together (revealing they may not be so random and telling her a story) she also finds she’s developing feelings for Mackenzie that she can’t explain away.
Eventually (without spoiling the ending) Annalise has to confront the possibility that maybe not everything has a logical explanation. Maybe magic and fate are real and maybe it has a plan for her. There is also a cute sideplot about Christmas Hallmark movies.
Please share your favorite line(s) or quote from this book:
My favourite line in this book happens right before they kiss for the first time. There’s a LOT of tension but it also kind of comes out of nowhere and I love it every single time I read it (and it would be an injustice to spoil it right now.) Instead, I’m gonna share a scene that I also love because it shows at the core who my two characters are. It takes place on a roof when my characters are still kind of getting to know each other.
“Did you go big, or take the altruistic route and wish for peace on earth?”
I roll my head so I can look at him. “Neither. I don’t really believe in wishes.”
His eyebrow lifts. “Really? Why not?”
I shrug, the nylon of my jacket making a rustling sound as I move. “I just don’t think that a hot rock flying through space has any ability to alter my life in any meaningful way—unless it’s about to clock me on the head.”
Mackenzie turns to face me. “Is it just hot rocks you’re against, or do you feel the same about birthday candles and turkey wishbones?”
I shake my head. “The whole gamut. I also call bullshit on astrology, predestination, reincarnation and Santa Claus.”
Please share a few Fun facts about this book…
- Annalise is a Hallmark Christmas movie junkie and there are two different movies she watches during the book, both of which I have entire plots written in my head–although only snippets are revealed (in case I ever need another career as a Harlequin Christmas romance writer)
- Although all my books are standalone they are very lightly interconnected. Annalise’s uncle Larry is the bartender from the curling club in This Spells Love and Mackenzie’s cousin Zoe is Jules’s best friend in Kitty St. Clair’s Last Dance
- My original idea for this book is that she was a heart transplant recipient and her donated organ was telling her a story, but it slowly evolved to a leather jacket
- All of the recipes gone wrong are actual recipes you can find on the Internet. Spaghetti-O flan is a real thing.
What first attracts your Hero to the Heroine and vice versa?
In one of the first scenes of the two of them together Annalise realises that Mackenzie is objectively hot and she finds herself subconsciously flirting (mirroring him and smiling) but she quickly writes that off as biology. She really falls over his genuine care of her. He walks her home in the middle of the night and puts a blanket on her when she falls asleep on the couch. For Mackenzie, it’s that Annalise doesn’t dismiss his dream of being a songwriter. She encourages him to write and even pushes him a little to share his music (when she sees he’s not getting a fair shot.)
Did any scene have you blushing, crying or laughing while writing it? And Why?
There is always one scene in my book that I write nearly perfectly on the first attempt. It kind of just pours out of me. For This Spell’s Love, it was the horny curling scene and in Solar Eclipse of the Heart, it’s the horny sink fixing scene (sense a pattern?) Mackenzie and Annalise’s neighbour wakes them one morning with a plumbing emergency and, well…..
Mackenzie is on his knees. His grey sweatpants are drenched and clingy. His hair is soaked and slicked back as if he’s just pushed it from his eyes and there are droplets of water running down his chest.
It is straight out of a romantic fantasy.
Or maybe a porno.
I guess the distinction lies in what happens next.
He holds out his hand and takes the wrench. His other hand retracts enough to see that he’s also holding a flashlight.
“Any chance you can hold the beam here?” He shows me where to aim the light and then hands it to me, but I can’t quite get the right angle from where I’m standing.
“Can you move a little to your left?” I say as I drop to my knees beside him, drenching my sweatpants. He scooches over enough so I can see inside.
“Yeah. Right there,” his thighs press against mine as he leans forward. “You got it.” He shifts so his entire upper body is inside the vanity. It requires me to brace my non-flashlight-holding hand against his back to hold the correct position.
His back flexes under my fingertips.
My rational brain knows this is a motor response to the task at hand, but the rest of me wants to slide my hand down his back and feel the strength of each and every muscle.
I don’t know what is wrong with me.
It’s as if last night reworked my brain.
I unplugged the wire that attached “Mackenzie” and “forbidden” and reinserted it into “possibility.”
Where before I could ignore the overly handsome wannabe rock star walking around half-naked in my apartment, now I can’t look away.
Readers should read this book….
If they are looking for a little more joy and stomach butterflies and to leave thinking that maybe there is a little magic in this world. It’s not Colleen Hoover angsty but it does make you think about soulmates and fate. If it makes you cry, they are happy tears and hopefully you’re kicking your feet at the same time.
What are you currently working on? What other releases do you have in the works?
My next rom-com “Back to Our Future” will come out in Spring of 2028 (to be confirmed.) I also have a cozy romance short story about a hockey mom (technically hockey aunt) who is thrown into the world of competitive children’s hockey and needs to solve a mystery (while balancing a hot coach and a hot cop.) It’s part of an anthology coming out in January called MURDER CUTE.
Thanks for blogging at HJ!
Giveaway: One (1) finished copy of SOLAR ECLIPSE OF THE HEART for a US winner!
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Excerpt from Solar Eclipse of the Heart:
I can hear the music pumping from the store’s speakers as soon as I round the corner onto Queen Street. It’s some obscure song by some obscure band I don’t even attempt to pretend I’ve heard of. The store’s front door is propped open by a tiny stone garden gnome painted to loosely resemble Snoop Dogg, allowing the tiny blue-haired woman to wheel out a rack of carefully curated secondhand treasures onto the storefront sidewalk.
The rack suddenly picks up speed down the ramp, then swings hard to the right. But just as it’s about to flatten me, Koko Hayashida, the owner and sole proprietor of Thrift Me Baby (One More Time), gives it a hard yank, pulling it backward before she locks the metal wheel latch into place with her foot and looks up.
“Oh, hey, Lise.” Koko waves a white crocheted vest in my direction. “Happy Friday.”
Within twenty-eight seconds of our first encounter on this exact same spot three months ago, she gave me a nickname, immediately dropping the dowdy “Anna” half of my name for the much cooler and shorter “Lise.”
“Hey.” I brush my dark fringed bangs from my forehead and loop my right hand under the strap of my backpack, letting it slip from my shoulder in an effort to look more cool and Lise-like.
“Looks like you’ve been doing some shopping?” I incline my head and peer into her already crowded vintage shop, wondering where this rack of clothing even fit before she pulled it out onto the sidewalk.
“Yeah. That place over on Dufferin had another pop-up.” Koko pulls a bright yellow beaded gown from the rack and holds it up. “I think most of the stuff came from that Law & Order spin-off they were filming downtown all last year, but they had some cute dresses.” She turns the gown so the light makes the beading shimmer. “Fifteen bucks for this. I couldn’t resist.” She hooks the hanger back onto the rack.
“Are you just getting home from work?” She glances at the gold vintage Cartier on her left hand. It’s another one of her secondhand finds. According to last week’s sidewalk conversation, she thrifted the watch from an impromptu garage sale she happened across on her walk to work last month for forty dollars. Even from the upside-down angle, I can see that the time reads almost six.
I nod and resist the urge to slide my arm back through my strap, so it once again sits ergonomically on my back, relieving the weight of my laptop and notebooks.
“Yes. Long day.” I look past her, toward the painted yellow door next to her store that leads up to my second-floor apartment—home to my sweatpants, my incredibly comfortable couch, and my premium subscription Netflix account.
“You look like you could use a drink or three,” she says. “I’m closing up in an hour or so. What are you up to later? You should come out.” She says it more like a statement than a question. “My friend Lucien knows this guy who is bartending at this great new place in Ossington. He says the cocktails are a little gaudy, but that’s kind of the norm these days.”
I smile as if I know about the norm these days. “That sounds really great; I’m just not a drinker.” Or a stay-out-past-nine-thirty-er or socialize-with-strangers-unless-I-absolutely-have-to-er.
She continues to smile at me.
We have been doing this delicate sidewalk dance for three months or so, since she opened her thrift store below my apartment, replacing the dry cleaner, who I highly suspect was using the place as a front to launder money, seeing as he only seemed to be open on Tuesdays and every other Sunday. Our conversations have slowly progressed from deliberate eye contact to casual “heys” to a friendly level of chitchat. The last few weeks she has started to invite me to things: casual drinks, free concerts in the park, her friend Ramone’s autobiographical one-person show. Although I’ve come to enjoy our impromptu chats, I’m just not sure we’re ready to take things to the next level. “And I actually have a thing tonight.
“It’s a dinner at that big Polish church over on Roncey,” I explain. “They awarded me this scholarship for my PhD. It’s not all that much—just two grand—but they’re having this big awards ceremony tonight for all the recipients. I think they will make us all stand onstage and receive those big cardboard checks. Anyway, I need to be there. Thank you for the offer, though.” I take another step toward my door.
It’s not that I don’t like Koko—I do. It’s just that humans, as a species, typically prefer forming close bonds with similar people. It’s a biological instinct driven by our mammalian brains. Our personal safety is dependent on flocking with herds that are as akin to us as possible, and I cannot imagine anyone describing Koko and me as birds of the same feather. Koko is effortlessly cool in her two-sizes-too-big carpenter pants and a tiny cropped top that looks like it once lived a double life as an elderly man’s necktie. She has a glossy blue bob, and I have practical penny loafers and the same button-down blouse bought in three colors because it fits my short torso and disproportionately long arms.
We simply don’t match.
Putting all that aside, there’s also the fact that I have less than three months until I’m heading off across the pond to Liverpool to pursue my PhD degree in neuroscience. We would be investing in a relationship that would most likely dwindle to an obligatory sporadic text message every few months.
“What are you wearing?” Koko’s question catches me so off guard that I stare down at my blouse, wondering if I accidentally said that last part out loud.
I pull at the hem. “It’s a hundred percent cotton. The store had a BOGO.”
Koko laughs. “No, not right now. I meant tonight. It sounds like it’s a big deal. Do you have something special that you are planning to wear?”
Again, my eyes fall to my blouse, preferring the previous question to this one. “Uh . . . I don’t know. Maybe like black slacks and a shirt?” My voice inflects upward as if I’m asking her the question.
She shakes her head in a way that I immediately know I’ve said the wrong thing. It’s confirmed as she grabs my wrist and tugs me inside the store with a roll of her eyes and a “Come on.”
As soon as I’m inside, Koko begins pulling clothes from three different racks, all within arm’s reach.
“I have a few ideas,” she says, tossing me a brightly patterned dress. “The hall will be hot this time of year. Everyone’s turned their air off. You’ll want something that breathes and a jacket for when it gets cold later.”
She’s right about both things. I find a room full of strangers stifling on a good day, let alone the mid-September heat wave we seem to be having. But there is a nice breeze once the sun goes down. It blows right off Lake Ontario, keeping the south end of Toronto a few degrees cooler than the north and thus making a commuting jacket a necessity.
Koko drops another dress into my hands along with a tube of fabric I’m not entirely certain is a skirt or a top. “Pop these on.” She nods toward a tiny dressing room separated from the rest of the store by a pink velvet curtain.
I obey, slipping inside and pulling the curtain closed behind me. I take a second to breathe before I slip out of my blouse and jeans. The dress slides on easily, but there is no mirror inside, so I am forced to pull back the curtain and step back into the store and Koko’s assessing gaze.
“Cute,” she says, addressing the dress and not my socked feet, which I’ve only now realized are two black trouser socks that are noticeably different lengths.
“But maybe try the blue one next.” She shoos me back behind the curtain. “It will bring out those beautiful ocean eyes.” I do as she says, grateful that, unlike the fabric tube, the blue one is a scooped-neck sundress with puff sleeves, tiny buttons, and, more important, a zipper, which makes it very
easy to tell the back from the front.
When I step out again, I can immediately see from the lift of Koko’s eyebrows that she approves.
“What do you think?” She turns me toward the three-way mirror and watches me appraise my reflection. The dress’s cinched waist gives the illusion of curves where they otherwise don’t exist, and the periwinkle does seem to bring the blue out in my eyes. I lift my arm to glance at the price tag. It’s eighty dollars. I wince, knowing I would think twice about buying a dress like this new, let alone used.
“It’s vintage,” Koko says as if reading my thoughts. “And it’s my treat.” She turns my shoulders and steers me back toward the changing room. “It’s my way of saying thank you for not calling the cops last weekend. We were way later than I said we’d be.”
I am pretty certain she’s referring to the party she held last Saturday in the store. It was her friend Ramone’s birthday. The music thumped up through my floorboards until after three. Koko had invited me to that one, too. Instead, I put in my earplugs.
I glance again at the price tag dangling from my arm before pulling the velvet curtain closed behind me. “That’s nice of you to offer, but I totally don’t mind paying.”
“No, no,” she calls from what sounds like the opposite side of the store. “I insist. That dress fits as if it were made for you. It’s a sign from the universe that you should have it.”
A sign.
A sharp pain shoots below my ribs. It’s been nine months since Larry’s death and over a year since his diagnosis and still the smallest things bring painful reminders.
Uncle Larry lived his life guided by signs.
“Sometimes the path ahead isn’t always clear,” he would say whenever faced with a difficult decision, and on occasion when deciding what to order for dinner. “The universe will always send you a message if you look hard enough.”
And Larry would always look.
Sometimes, he’d find his answer in his horoscope or the tiny leaves that escaped his Tetley tea bag. Sometimes, it was in the abstract shape of a cumulus cloud.
Sometimes, when he couldn’t find the message he was looking for, he’d reach into his wallet and pull out a yellow slip of legal pad paper with the words “this is your sign” scrawled in his own handwriting in blue Bic pen.
“See, Beans.” He’d hold up the paper and laugh. “I’m meant to [insert whatever wild idea he’d come up with that day],” and then he’d go right ahead and do whatever he wanted to do in the first place.
My moment of grief is interrupted by a zip, then a ding, from what I’m certain is the cash register opening and closing. It’s followed by footsteps and the high-pitched squeak of metal rubbing on metal as if she’s sifting through one of her clothing racks. The bell above the door tinkles as if it’s been opened. I hear Koko say, “Okay, thanks,” presumably to the person who walked in. The bell chimes again, and the store grows quiet until Koko asks, “Any plans for the weekend?”
It’s a moment before I realize she’s talking to me. “Uh, yeah . . . I guess. My new roommate moves in tomorrow. Her bus gets in sometime in the morning so I need to stick around to give her a key.”
“New roommate. That’s kind of exciting. What’s her deal?” Koko’s voice is noticeably louder than a moment ago, placing her on the other side of the curtain.
I shrug even though she can’t actually see me. “I don’t know too much about her other than her name is Mackenzie Smith and she’s a musician from some small town up north. I guess she got a job down here. She plays the tuba, so maybe the Toronto Symphony? We’ve only really emailed, but she seems nice.”
“I’m sure she is.” Koko’s arm juts through the crack of the changing room. “Here, try this on, too.”
A wooden hanger dangles from her fingertips. On it is a black leather biker jacket, cracked but soft as if made from quality leather but aged with years of use.
“What size is this?” I take the hanger from her hands. The jacket looks like it would fit a large man.
“It’s meant to be big,” Koko says, her voice getting farther away with each word. “Oversized is in right now.”
I know the moment I slip it off the hanger, the jacket will be a hard no. It’s too edgy. A step too far from the nerdy wannabe neuroscientist who actually enjoys the shapeless institutional cut of her lab coat. Still, I zip back up the dress I was taking off only a moment ago and slide the jacket on. I open my mouth to tell Koko thanks for the offer but I don’t think it’s going to work, when the world around me suddenly goes dark.
Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.
Book Info:
When a PhD candidate inherits more grief than she can quantify, an infuriatingly attractive musician—and his mysterious leather jacket—unravel everything she thought she knew about love, loss, and the laws of reality.
Annalise Harris believes in facts and figures—her shield against a world that has thrown her too many curveballs. Raised by her uncle after her mother’s untimely death, she’s always relied on logic to avoid the unexpected. So when her uncle passes away, Annalise is left reeling. Grief doesn’t follow rules. There’s no rational explanation as to why life keeps dealing her such a brutal hand.
Luckily, she has an escape plan: a PhD program abroad, where she can immerse herself in scientific reasoning and leave everything else behind. She’s almost packed and she’s found Mackenzis Smith—the perfect roommate to watch over the house while she’s gone. But unluckily, Mackenzie is not the female roommate she was expecting, but a leather-jacket-wearing, wannabe rockstar, extremely attractive man. At least they’ll only be sharing the space for a few months. Then she’ll be gone.
Except Mackenzie is more than he appears—and so is his jacket. When Annalise slips it on one afternoon, she’s struck by inexplicable visions that defy every law of logic she holds dear. One moment she’s standing in her apartment; the next, she’s somewhere completely different…and nobody can see her. Is she hallucinating? Has the stress of all the impending changes broken her brain? As Annalise scrambles to explain the impossible, she and Mackenzie grow closer, bonding over Hallmark Christmas movies and their neighbor’s inexplicably strange baked goods.
There’s no rational reason an old leather jacket should unlock visions—or for Annalise to fall for a musician with an uncertain future just as she’s preparing to move across an ocean. But for the first time since losing her uncle, she feels something she thought was gone for good: happiness.
The question is, can she trust it? And can she follow her heart—even if it means letting go of sense?
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Meet the Author:
Kate Robb is the author of This Spells Love, Prime Time Romance, and Kitty St. Clair’s Last Dance. She dated a lot of duds in her twenties (amongst a few gems) all providing excellent fodder to write weird and wild romantic comedies. She lives just outside of Toronto, Canada, where she spends her free time pretending she’s not a hockey mom while whispering “hustle” under her breath from the bleachers, a Pinot Grigio concealed in her YETI mug. She hates owls, the word “whilst,” and wearing shorts and aspires to one day be able to wear four-inch heels again.
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